ArCo: An architecture for children to control a set of robots

This article presents ArCo which is an architecture for managing a digital environment in a context of ambient intelligence. ArCo can integrate all kinds of objects and is totally configurable. Moreover it proposes a visual programming interface, AmbiProg, which allows controlling each digital object which composes an environment. The objective of this paper is to appraise AmbiProg. An experiment was realized with 16 children around 10 years old. They were asked to realize exercises in a limited period of time. The objective was to determine if programming was easy and how many times they needed to learn scenarios creation. It appeared that they succeed tasks and were able to use AmbiProg. Programming an environment was easy as pie.